


Wizard Rager

by ChainSmokesPens



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drinking, Flash Fic, Witches, Wizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29134995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChainSmokesPens/pseuds/ChainSmokesPens
Summary: Prompt: [WP] Potions can work miracles, but the brewing process requires fermentation. Wizard battles frequently devolve into drunken bar fights.





	Wizard Rager

Somewhere in the courtyard an emptied vial shattered loudly against the cobblestone. Long, violet vines were crawling up the pillars surrounding the open space. There wasn’t a cloud in sight, but the rumbling of thunder resounded and the flash of lightning zipped along the sky.  
Vicente rubbed his fingers across his eyes as he set his stein beneath the keg’s tap. The sun was too bright today.  
Discovering that he had a gift for magic is what saved him from having to go to his local college. He wouldn’t have to deal with taking two years of meaningless classes in the loose hopes that he’d be allowed to graduate with his communications degree.  
A witch in the courtyard was hit by a plume of red smoke. She emerged from it a wizard.  
He wouldn’t have to spend his well-earned money at the cafeteria; meat that had never been alive, vegetables that had never been exposed to the real sun’s light.  
One wizard in the corner couldn’t handle his potions. He wretched up a bit of yellow-green bile, followed by a green-yellow tentacle.  
He wouldn’t have to live in a dirty room, woken up every morning by his roommate finally getting back, still drunk, a new partner on his hip.  
Vicente finally thought to twist the tap. The brew began to float upwards. He considered that it may have just been the nature of the batch, but when he himself started floating, he said a small chant to affix his gravity to the ground. Most other’s in the courtyard weren’t sober enough to do the same.  
And, finally, he wouldn’t have to deal with the frat house parties. Living adjacent to his local college’s campus his whole life, he knew that when they partied, the whole town partied.  
The vomiting wizard finished, falling to his back in exhaustion, as the tentacled…thing he had thrown up undulated like a jellyfish, moving toward the city at the bottom of the hill.  
No, having awoken to his magical potential, Vicente leapt at the opportunity to finally get out of his home town, in spite of his poor grades. He’d get to explore a hidden continent and live in a pre-modern city, away from the noise pollution, light pollution, and regular pollution he’d grown used to over the years. He’d get to see legends preserved in time and reality, unviolated by the limiting scope of science. And he’d get to pierce the cosmos, internalizing that the periodic table of the soul was infinitely more expansive, more powerful, and could drive humanity farther than anything centuries of science in an “enlightened era could”.  
Two witches stumbled to the kegs, each erroneously leaning on the other to support their drunken gaits. One belched and a puff of white fire escaped her. The both broke down laughing.  
Those were the promises, anyway.  
A ball of mud whiffed past his head, clung to the wall, grew limbs, and began to ascend to the gutters. He tried to twist the keg again, his mug filled with a frothy, purple elixir.  
Vicente’s classes here were far from meaningless, but they did propose some concepts he couldn’t understand. The nature of the periodic table of the soul, for instance, implied that for every element you discovered ten more would appear. Text books were written in English, but it was Old English, and they were all written in some form of thrice-reversed cursive. And, most surprisingly, almost every potion made needed to be fermented at some point before its powers would take effect.  
One of his professors, demonstrating out his newest batch of potion out in the courtyard, held a barrel up to his mouth, dousing himself as he drank from it. And then he lit himself on fire.  
The food at the school was natural, just not natural to any world he knew of. Eating the food he’d grown up with, Earth food, “mundane” food, apparently did nothing to nourish him as a magician. To get those nice magic minerals, you needed to eat food from other worlds.  
An alarming degree of which was still sentient when it landed on the plate.  
There was a soft hum in the distance. Looking up, Vicente saw something falling. The soft hum evolved into a scream as the wizard got closer. He collided with the cobblestone, his flesh and bones shattering like an eggshell and his clear viscera spreading out. A little yellow chick hopped from the mess and made its way to the dorms.  
His room was, thankfully, clean, but his roommate did still come back with a different partner every night. Some of them were other witches or wizards. Most of them were just shaped like witches and wizards. Vicente spent much of the previous night awake to the sound of clicking teeth and woke to a curtain of mucus hanging around his bottom bunk.  
He looked around at the courtyard, magic flying wildly.  
The ragers that happened were unimaginable, consistently unimaginable. Last night alone the city streets got flooded by a river of sheep’s wool. People dining in open areas had their steak dinners turn to boars and their pork dinners turn to bulls. One of the professors went streaking, a litters-worth of cats springing from her feet with every step. Another professor made the planets align fifty years too early because he wanted to get his brew done quicker. A few wizards made their way into the chapel and some sort of god opened the clouds, throwing bolts of lightning to drive them out.  
Vicente brought his stein to his lips. Back to work.

**Author's Note:**

> Too good to pass up.


End file.
